elections

With at least 20 Voters First Pledge signers coming in as freshman members of Congress, joining 73 incumbent signers and another 14 incumbents on the record in support of Clean Elections-style public financing of campaigns (and this with several races yet undecided) we are seeing a strong voter mandate for cleaning up Congress. What do you think about the election results?

Even as votes are still being counted in close races around the country, speculation on reforms to counter the high-cost, special-interest dominated election process is being offered up. Writers at both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Winston-Salem Journal cite the Voters First Pledge, its principles and signers, as showing the way forward.

David Donnelly, our national campaigns director, writes over at MyDD about visiting his son's class to talk about elections - and facing the difference between "classroom democracy" and the real power-brokering in Washington.

I know Rick wrote about this earlier, but I wanted to add my two cents...

In 2004, in the general election, DeLay received 55% of the vote. Yesterday, in a low turnout, only-the-faithful-voting primary election, he got 62%, only slightly better than where he was among all voters, Democrats included, a year and a half ago.

DeLay was able to secure the GOP nod in TX-22 (he received 62% of the vote) but not by the margin expected from a sitting incumbent in a Republican leaning district. DeLay remains as vulnerable as people have been saying he is. Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said:

"DeLay will have to capture two-thirds of the vote in order to claim he's out of trouble."